If you read any papers besides the Guardian, the Times and the FT you will no doubt have recently spotted one of several full-page colour ads for MegaStar, the Daily Star's website. Carried in titles including the Telegraph, the Independent and the London Evening Standard, the ads have featured a variety of topless women covering up their ample curves with large placards. These have carried a range of straight news headlines such as "Aptitude tests aid entry to elite academic institutions" and "Polo aims to be populist not elitist sport, says lord".
This somewhat unlikely juxtaposition of nudity with rather posh news has been aimed at highlighting the fact that MegaStar offers online users "visionary and definitive sports analysis" and even "in-depth news and current affairs" as well as, erm, the rather more colourful, titillating fare of scantily-clad women.
Not surprisingly, several broadsheets have refused to carry them, some no doubt worrying about eyebrows being raised in Milton Keynes and bulging postbags.
But this is not unusual - newspapers and magazines often reject one-off ads and even whole campaigns. While TV stations cannot make independent decisions on what commercials to allow (all TV ads are pre-vetted by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre), individual print media organisations have the power to decide which advertisements they want to carry - and which not.
Gary Ward, head of communications at the Advertising Standards Authority, the print advertising watchdog which monitors complaints about ads after they have been published, explains: "There is no equivalent of the BACC in print. There is no pre-vetting system - that would be impossible because there are over 30m print ads a year. The decision is therefore left to the discretion of the individual publishers and media owners."
Aside from making sure ads are not misleading or unlawful, as laid out in the British Code of Advertising, the press mostly vet copy supplied by advertisers because they want to "protect" their readers and safeguard their product's reputation. This manifests itself in general issues of taste and decency - the most common reasons for ads being rejected. Kevin Brown, a partner at MegaStar's ad agency Soul, says: "We wanted to run the ads in quality newspapers because our target audience is ABC1 men - and they read the broadsheets. We were simply using the media environment and our creative message to stand out and grab attention. The ads are not tasteless but fun, pretty harmless and very striking in that environment. It seems over the top to me that those papers refused to carry them."
The Guardian maintains it rejected them "because editorially we did not agree with the way they represented the site". Brown says other reasons given were variations on the theme of "they would upset our readers" or "the ads are too over the top for our publication": in short, it was the naked flesh that was judged unacceptable, with one title even suggesting that if the women were put in sarongs and T-shirts they would reconsider.
While nudity might be offensive to some papers, however, swearing can cause ructions elsewhere. A Saatchi & Saatchi ad for the NSPCC in 1995 carried a picture of a clenched fist with the word "love" tattooed on it. The copy below read: "The only love I ever got from my father. Bastard." Despite the power of this idea, the Sun refused to run the advert, loftily stating at the time: "We are a family paper and we don't allow swearing."
Cosmopolitan has also been known to take a stance against ads it perceives to be sexist. There was a Wonderbra advertisement last year featuring a girl in a Santa outfit beside the saucy line: "The tree won't be the only thing that lights up this Xmas". Cosmo rejected it, apparently, for belittling women.
Chatlines or overtly sexy advertisements are also frequently outlawed. But it is most often charity ads which fall foul of the press's sense of taste and decency, largely because they depend on shocking imagery to pack their punch.
Earlier this year, a very hard- hitting advertisement by Bartle Bogle Hegarty for Barnado's was rejected by the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. It featured a baby sitting in a filthy room with a tourniquet round its arm, as if preparing to shoot up heroin.
The Mail has also just thrown out the latest Barnado's advertisement which features a young boy lying lifeless beside a sawn-off shotgun outside a bank, having seemingly bungled a raid. John Teal, ad director on the newpaper, explains: "We have carried other adverts in the campaign, but the one showing a baby jacking up and the other with a child and a shotgun were considered by the editorial department to be distasteful and unsuitable, and offensive to the readers. We have run editorial articles about the campaign but as far as these ads are concerned we decided not to carry them."
Given that it is the editorial departments that tend to rule on advertisement acceptance (the ad departments being more driven to accept anyone's cash), some decisions are often simply down to the whim of an editor. He or she might want fox-hunting banned and therefore refuse to carry pro-hunting ads from the Countryside Alliance, while pro-euro or Europe advertising might be banned by, say, the Sun.
Political ads might also be refused on the grounds that they don't fit in with editorial policy. A right-leaning paper could, for instance, refuse to carry ads for New Labour - or at least charge them a prohibitively expensive rate which effectively rules them out of appearing.
Other moral stands are sometimes taken. The FT, for instance, unlike most other national newspapers, refuses to carry tobacco advertisements at all.
But, perhaps most predictably, it is ads for competitive products that invariably fail to make it - if they even bother to try. Peter Barrie, display ad manager on the Telegraph, explains: "Commercial issues could well make us refuse an ad, for instance if it was for a rival newspaper. We would probably charge ratecard, and so not do them any deal, but if it really was a direct rival like the Times we would probably turn them down altogether."
The issue which most frustrates advertisers and their agencies when dealing with rejected ads is the lack of understanding and the apparent inconsistency of policy from one paper to the next - or indeed from the same publication. In the case of the MegaStar campaign, the aforementioned broadsheets refused it but it was warmly welcomed by such august journals as Legal Week, Golf International and even the Spectator. At the same time, the Daily Mail rejected the heroin baby but was happy to carry another Barnado's ad that featured a young girl standing like a soliciting prostitute on a street corner beside a parked car.
Press editors simply take the view that it is their prerogative to accept or reject adverts, on whatever seemingly unreasonable or inconsistent grounds those might be. In general, however, they would rather be broad-minded enough to carry every ad that is booked into their publication - not least because of the financial implications of rejecting something. With a campaign of full-page colour press ads being worth as much as £500,000, they reject too much copy at their peril.
Barrie concludes: "We are extremely liberal, within the law. Why would we turn something down? It's money, and it's up to the readers. Some papers might claim an ad is in poor taste, but so is the Sun - and 4m people happily read that."
